Planning a Web Project

by Amy Kerr

In this article:

Project Objectives

Defining a project's objectives can seem deceptively simple. At the beginning of the planning process, however, it is a good idea to take a step back and identify exactly the goals you and your team want to achieve with the website. It is worthwhile to write down these primary objectives. If you are designing the site for a client, have the client confirm the objectives. The written objectives do not have to be long or complex. They can be as informal as a few sentences in a bulleted list.

One of the most important questions to ask as you begin the planning process is: does the content already have the audience you want or does the content need to attract an audience and bring it back regularly. To help clarify, you could think about this question in terms of what would be a more appropriate print genre for your content, a textbook or a newspaper? The answer to that question will fundamentally impact the way you plan and design your site.

When you have the site's primary objectives down on paper, go through the process of prioritizing them. Later in the project, as your team is designing the site, you'll want to refer back to this list of objectives. Prioritizing the objectives will help guide design decisions later.

Bad and good objectives

Watch out for objectives that may indicate you do not have solid reasons for building the website. Although they may not be worded exactly this way, the following types of objectives should send up red flags:

To compete with another organization that has a website
To tell people about yourself or your organization
To have a Web presence

These objectives are not always "bad" reasons to build a site, but they should be part of a list that includes reasons that reflect the advantages of the Web as a communication medium, such as:

To save printing costs on direct mail or catalogs
To provide updated materials more quickly to customers
To make information available through search engines

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